Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

SEPTEMBER 8 2018

MY STRUGGLE

I grew up in a time in the Netherlands when all facets of my family life were ruled by RELIGION: I attended Christian schools on all levels. My father was a member of a Christian Political Party, then in power. My mother attended meetings of the Christian Women Association. My older brother played on a Christian Soccer Team. We read a Christian Daily Newspaper. Everything was Christian, Christian Radio, Christian …. You name it.

That same mentality was still alive and well among the thousands of Dutch immigrants, I among them, who arrived on Canada’s shores in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

In 1955 we moved from Hamilton to St. Catharines, then a hotbed of that sort of thinking thanks to some leading figures there, such as Marinus Koole and Dr. Paul Schrotenboer, our minister, American by birth. Every week I met with a group to study the philosophy of Dooyeweerdt, a Free University (Amsterdam) professor, whose book was incomprehensible. Never mind. Also I was among the scores of young adults attending the Unionville conferences, where enthusiasm for a new approach to Christian thinking was invigorating.

I soon got involved in the Christian School Movement, functioning for 6 years as the secretary of both the board of Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, and the local Christian School (1959-65). When in 1965 2,500 Christian Reformed young people from all over the USA and Canada came to a Young Peoples’ Convention in Niagara Falls, I chaired the committee organizing this huge 4 day event.

Always the activist, I was an elder in the Christian Reformed Church and, when we moved to Tweed, also in the Presbyterian Church, at one time chairing the regional assembly of their churches, the so-called Presbytery, for 2 years, and becoming the convener of the National Board of Trustees for 4 years, overseeing the denominational finances and pension funds.

Disillusioned?

Today I am not so sure any more about the merits of all these bodies. My outlook has changed, and I sense that stagnation has affected most Christian enterprises. So what’s lacking?

I believe it is the overall religious outlook that is missing. The late Dr. Evan Runner, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., some decades ago, coined the phrase LIFE IS RELIGION, a state that has been the norm from time immemorial.

Recently I started to read THE ILIAD by Homer, a 2500 year old 600 page Greek story, all about Helen and Troy, about Agamemnon and Achilles and, of course, Odysseus and the gods, oh my, all sorts of them: the book is saturated with religion.

I love the books by Tony Hillerman as he describes the goings on in Navajo country in New Mexico and Arizona, everything ensconced in religious symbols, so typical of most aboriginal life.

The Middle Ages were that too. Dr. Johan Huizinga starts his classic THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES as follows: (As I only have the 1972, 50th anniversary edition in Dutch, HERFTTIJ DER MIDDELEEUWEN, here is my translation),
“When the world was 500 years younger (now 600 years), life’s happenings were much more sharply delineated than today. Between suffering and elation, between natural disasters and happiness, the distance seemed much greater than is the case now. Whatever people then experienced, it still had that quality of immediacy and finality, comparable to the joy and sadness so typical of children. Every expression of life’s happenings, every action was accompanied by highly expressive religious rituals, had the value and symbols of a strict and enduring lifestyle. Big events such as birth, marriage, death, because they were seen as fundamental, were anchored and shrouded in divine mystery. But also the less momentous occasions, a voyage, a certain undertaking, or simply a visit, were accompanied by an untold number of blessings, ceremonies, proverbs, and traditional formulations.”

The Middle Ages were so unlike today. Then “Religion” included every action, every movement. Today the connotation “Religious” suffers from negative overtones, such as anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-earth, anti-almost everything, but pro-heaven, pro-Trump, pro-gun and pro- economic growth.

We no longer are awed by anything, and with that lack of reverence, God too is gone, banned from his very own earth. Where not too long ago moving to a new continent meant parting for life, today we routinely travel to the ends of the earth as easily as visiting a neighbor – if we still do that.
God – religion – is reserved for an hour on Sunday, with only a minute portion of the population in attendance, usually old traditionalists and often fervent heaven-believers.

Will the church survive?

It’s difficult for the church today. The sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, and the division there between progressives- the Pope- and conservatives – the Curia – is out in the open. Also the entire religious spectrum has to compete with 24/7 TV ads, offering a much more attractive picture, while daily life is so busy that there is no time for reflection. Today conformity reigns.

Pope Francis again.

His visit to Ireland kindled all these reflections. There, once a bastion of Roman Catholic thinking, the Pope received a cold reception, greeted with jeers. How have times changed! Not so long ago Ireland was the most Catholic of all catholic nations. Not so long ago I was the most active of all active Christians. And how have I changed!

All inclusive.

In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed, hangs a large Celtic cross crafted by one of our parishioners. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross, is said to represent the globe, expressing the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures. The cross, of course, represents Jesus’ sacrificial death to regain creation. Together they reflect the practice of listening for the living Word in nature as well as in the Bible.

That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. His name simply means John, the Scotsman from Ireland.

He taught that Christ moves among us in two shoes, as it were, one shoe being that of Creation, the other that of the Scriptures, and stressed the need to be as alert and attentive to Christ moving among us in creation as we are to the voice of Christ in the Scriptures. One of his prayers was, “Show to us that in everything we touch, in every one we meet we see your presence.”

The basic goodness in creation is a special feature of Celtic Christianity. Says the Irish John: “God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. Evil is opposed to the existence of creation and where goodness is creative, evil is destructive.”

As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. I know that feeling. In 1225 the main writings of John the Irishman, were condemned by the Pope and in 1685 they were placed on the Index, the papal list of forbidden writings. But the Celtic influence persisted. The people of the many islands off the Scottish coast, the Hebrides, living in isolation for centuries, retained much of the Celtic religion in their traditions.

My struggle.

My struggle is with my growing conviction that today God has ceased to speak, has ceased to be heard in the church, has ceased to have any influence in society on a general level, even though he still works in people’s hearts.

My struggle concerns my growing unease, perhaps sadness that the message of an all-inclusive faith is not getting through. With Elijah I too take comfort from 1 Kings 19: 18, “Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel–all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.”

The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by gnostic Roman Catholic and Protestant dualism. The bible is very clear on this.

Take Colossians 1:15 -20, that beautiful passage exemplifies the Celtic Spirit more than any other. This is what verse 15 says: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Jordan Peterson in his book “The Twelve Steps, an antidote to Chaos”, points to this passage. I believe that when God planned the creation, he started with duplicating himself in the form of Jesus Christ, in the form of a human being, the firstborn of all creation. We are his image: we look like Christ, created from the lowest material, the ‘Ur’ stuff of creation: clay. That’s why we must love The Earth.

Verse 16 continues in that vein: “For by Christ all things were created.” That makes “all things” HOLY! Celtic Religion saw it that way, but the church objected, even till today: hence my struggle. Doctrine, church dogma, human wisdom, became the measure of faith at the expense of creation. We now see the result. We see a world plagued with pollution, plagued with poverty, plagued with a plurality of pains.

Again the closeness to creation, but also the sense that Christ is in everything, including ourselves, based on this very bible passage in Col.1:19, where it says that God was pleased to have all God’s fullness dwell in Jesus. Celtic confession states that,
Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Celtic Christianity does not see a gap between heaven and earth, no, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.

A long time ago the now defunct Presbyterian Record had a review on a book called: “The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christians can reach the West.”

The author outlines five proven Celtic Church practices he believes are needed today.

(1) We need to move from the ‘lone ranger’ approach in the church, where the minister is the all and in all, to partnership forms of ministry.

(2) We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.

I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where each is on his/her own in our own dwelling. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something that need to be explored and, who knows, the future may impose this sort of living on us. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books, discussing Father and Son McNeil’s book, The Human Web, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities, ”Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”

(3) We must develop imaginative/ contemplative prayer patterns.
I have been a member of our prayer group for years and recommend this.

(4) Practice open and full hospitality as our prime response to those who are seeking.

We are all very private people and not prone to open our houses and hearts to others. In our busyness, we think we have no time for this.

(5) Rediscover that belonging comes before believing for those new to the faith.

These are new times.

We see every day what the current way of Christianity is bringing to the world: destruction and pollution.
The Celtic cross expresses this plainly. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross represents the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in scriptures.

The Good News is that this evil world, now dominated by, yes, The Evil One, (see 1 John 5: 19), is about to undergo a metamorphosis – a total radical change. Only those who equally undergo a METANOIA – a total change of mind – a mentality that recognizes AND implements a life that, in principle, resembles life in eternity, will inherit the new earth: the meek, those who live simple lives, will inherit the earth. (Psalm 37: 11)

Sadly, I see little or no signs that this is happening on a communal level, which makes me echo Jesus’ words: Luke 18: 8, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

SEPTEMBER 1 2018

Globe and Mail HEADLINE.

“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

“The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.”
Balzac
We all are criminals. We all have great wealth, even the poorest among us are rich by historical standards. We all have cars, all have late model TVs, all live, on an average, more than 80 years, something unheard off 100 years ago.

How is that possible?

The horrible truth is that we all thrive on the proceeds of a crime, a crime that nobody mentions, a crime that remained unacknowledged for some 200 years, and is now coming to haunt us to death.

“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. That was the headline in the Globe and Mail of Saturday August 25 2018. How true!

Laws are supposed to rule our lives. There still is a glimmer in us of the Divine Law, “Love God above everything else, and our neighbors as ourselves”, but that facet is fading fast, also because we give it a pious twist, as if we can love an unseen God. We can’t. We can’t love someone who is invisible: only Moses, God’s friend, was allowed to see a glimpse of God’s back.

‘God is invisible’, Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or has seen” (1 Tim. 6:16). It is impossible to love something unseen. That’s why God can only really be honored, can only really be praised properly, can only really be loved, when we embrace and value his creation above everything else. That’s how we adore great artists: by their legacy.

From the rising of the sun, to the hour of its setting, our constant pre-occupation ought to be: loving God’s creation in all its manifestations. Not doing this, results in sin and sin results in DEATH. Romans 6: 23 says it unequivocally, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

When the headline in Canada’s leading newspaper says, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”, then that’s only true for a few seconds in geological time, because it is impossible for humanity to thrive, to be happy, to be at ease and content when the entire planet is in agony.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined the Four Laws of Ecology. Here are the two most applicable:

1. Everything Is Connected To Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Humans and other species are connected/dependent on other species. With this in mind it becomes hard to practice anything other than compassion and harmlessness.
2. There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

We live in unparalleled luxury while everything around us is on fire, is being poisoned, is drowning, is endangered, then, as Law # 1 of Ecology, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE tells us, this will equally affect us. All this creational abuse will catch up on us and death is the outcome.

We feel instinctively that a day of reckoning comes, because, ”There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.”

Some of the following I owe to a 2004 Harper article: THE OIL WE EAT, written by Richard Manning.

Here’s how we Westerners, became rich at the expense of creation.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from nature’s rules. Take food. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain: it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY.”

When Adam and Eve appeared in The Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was One Hundred Percent: everything and everybody thrived, had sufficient food, has pure oxygen to breathe, had perfect water to drink, had unadulterated food to eat. Today everything is up in the air.

The brutal truth is that we humans, a single species among millions, consume perhaps as much as 50 percent of Earth’s Primary Productivity, 50 percent of all there is, air, soil, water, leaving little for the remainder of creation: hence we never had it so good, and the rest never had it so bad.

The Book of Revelation mentions 42 months, 3.5 years, exactly half of the PERFECT number 7. Specifically Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”

I believe that today we live in that “forty-two months” timeframe, busily blaspheming against God by harming creation, effectively sinning against one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. (Exodus 20:7). Misusing God’s name means harming creation.

The outcome is that, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. Fifty percent is midway, just as 42 months -3.5 years – is midway SEVEN. Using 50 percent of all there is, gives us untold riches, and also signals THE END.

We, the greedy 7.6 billion of us, have simply stolen the food (the rich among us, our Western World, a lot more than others) from all other living matter, and caused animals and plants to become extinct at alarming rates.

How did this crime become generally accepted?

More than two thirds of humanity’s cut of Primary Productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world.

From land to mouth

Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. That’s how Adam and Eve lived in Paradise: God’s advice to this human pair was to eat the fruit available there and then.

Why humans might have traded the hunter-gatherer approach for the labor-intensive-back-breaking work of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts – the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries.

Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’ In 1381, a radical priest called John Ball travelled the length of the country –England – stirring up the peasant class in a revolt against their feudal landowners. Nothing changed.

Farming is the process of ripping our precious earth open again and again. Take Iowa. Our oldest son lived there for a decade. We visited his family quite often. It used to be prairie, but is all fields now.
Here’s a true folly: we grow grains that we feed to livestock, but livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. There likely were more bison roaming the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today: and the stink! When the wind in that college town was from the East the entire town smelled like a sewer.

Oil is not well.

Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes some 20 liters of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land. Each year we burn through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.

Plato, a writer whom I had to read in Latin – oh how I hated him! – already lamented, “What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton”. Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the decline of Rome.

The Green Revolution.

Then science came to the rescue, a blessing until it became a curse: the Green Revolution. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of three grains, rice, wheat, corn, so that they could be hyper-charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. In my opinion this Green Revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, because commercial agriculture disrupted long-standing patterns of rural
life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty.

In the sixty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population has more than doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3.5 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The Green Revolution with plenty of water for irrigation, with loads of oil-based fertilizer and tinkered seeds, increased yields, and so contributed hugely to the population boom. In other words it’s OIL that caused that “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

About two thirds of U.S. and Canada’s grain and corn is labelled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the key ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes, and the suspected culprit in the American pandemic of obesity.

Ever considered the energy content of your breakfast?

A kilo of breakfast cereal, the grinding, milling, wetting, drying and baking, bums the energy of two liters of gasoline. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces before it leaves the factory floor. Add to this the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, and the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores, and the calorie total doubles.
So you wonder, perhaps why, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

It’s the OIL we eat, a perfectly pervasive poison, killing not only our bodies, but also our minds and spirits.

Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”

These forty-two months are now over: we’ve been eager participants in causing creational agony. Now it is our turn to suffer because EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.

AUGUST 25 2018

THE TWO WITNESSES,
CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE, and
NEAR TERM EXTINCTION

Revelation 11 has this strange story about two witnesses who appear out of nowhere, get a pretty good reception at first, then are killed, their bodies publicly displayed to the great delight of the crowd, then miraculously resurrected, and fetched up to heaven, followed by an enormous earthquake. Curiously during the past week there were 144 earthquakes in The Ring Of Fire, magnitude 4.3 or more. Is the Big One on the West Coast next?

J.H. Bavinck, in his EN VOORTWENTELEN DE EEUWEN, dealing with REVELATION, the last Bible book – which I have translated, 85,000 words, and gave the provisional title of AND ON AND ON THE AGES ROLL – describes this ‘witness’ episode in detail.

Here are some excerpts.

“At the same time these two witnesses will raise their voices in the world. The time for missionary work has past. Come and gone. The good news has done its job in the world. We now live in a time of apostasy, of chaos, and dissolution. Amidst this witless and disoriented generation these two persons, operating separately, will arise in the name of God.

“Their words will be seen and heard and read throughout the world thanks to the Internet. These two witnesses will appear in the midst of the utmost insanity of a world swiftly speeding to complete collapse. Millions will monitor their message. Are they the ones who can give new hope to a generation that is so tired and has lost its foothold? Do they have a new message for a world that is dying from uncertainty and insecurity?

“Again they will hold high the age-old message that only Jesus Christ is Lord, and that only in returning to him there is salvation. And when they proclaim this, the word will sound as something new, as something fresh, as something that deals with all the problems of the then living generation. Nothing stale, nothing withered, nothing that sound like platitudes or lack fire in their delivery, no, every word will sparkle with spirit and expressed with extraordinary eloquence. Even the most unrepentant unbeliever will realize that this pair knows what they are talking about and what they say is not some old-wife tale, but is the bruising reality.

“Will that mean that a general conversion will come about? Will these two really generate a following? There will be moments when it will look that this would actually happen, especially when, in their blind hate, some of them will try to kill them, and find out that this is impossible because they are authorized by God. That especially will force many to openly consider to follow these two witnesses and to accept their words.

“But still, their performance will not lead to universal conversion. The people of those days cannot really accept them as sent by God. Their message is too old-fashioned, too opposed to their deepest and most secret thoughts. After all they say things that has been heard from time immemorial and already then rejected as useless. They bring something to the fore that has, for centuries, been repeated ad nauseam and already then seen as something impossible for the modernity to embrace.

“These two witnesses, the carriers of the very last exhortation on behalf of God, will perish in the end, as so many other prophets and apostles before them. But that will still have to wait because of the then current universal confusion and disintegration. But eventually censure will halt the spread of the news and the film in the TV cameras will be destroyed. Forcefully the authorities will suppress all gossip related to it. These two witnesses are now old news. They were clever operators, but their time is up. We now must look ahead. Forget about the nonsense of these old fashioned preachers.”
So far Bavinck’s prophetic words.

My comments.

All this sounds pretty up-to-date. It is so true that the church is beyond repair. The current news about the Roman Catholic Church confirms that: only when Pope Francis issues an edict that from now on priests are allowed to marry or openly live with homosexual partners, and simultaneously give nuns the priestly status, will that church be saved.
Hans Küng, a now retired Catholic theologian, once said that it is within the power of the pontiff to abolish celibacy, and he informed Pope Francis of this, but, I believe, this will cause the CURIA to ask the Mafia to place a contract on the Pope.

More on the church as institute: it has too much baggage, too many buildings, far too much hierarchy, Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, all eager for more power.
Once the church abandoned house-churches and went into the building business, it sealed its doom.

Back to Bavinck:

“But apart from blaming the church there is another factor that acts as a delaying agent, something which now slowly is becoming visible. The very end can come only when the world has first degenerated into a condition where, in the most radical sense, the entire earth has become rebellious, godless, chaotic and lawless. Sin must become public, sin must be revealed what it in the most explicit sense really is and always has been.”

I believe that moment has now come, personified in the devilish appearance of Donald Trump. His ascent fits in precisely with the basic meaning of the Book of Revelation, which Bavinck describes as:
“Everything must become what they are. That is one of the dominating motifs of this remarkable book of the Bible, a motif that only at the very end of time comes to us in its naked reality: “Let they who do wrong let them continue to do wrong; let they who are vile, continue to do vile; let they who are right, continue to do right; let they who are holy, continue to be holy”. (Rev. 22:11).

“Right now his world is covered by a haze of untruthfulness: all things seem different than they are. The devil disguises himself as an angel of light, while the children of God often poorly reflect God’s image in their daily walk of life. Everything is unclear, unreal and non-transparent.
“Under the force of constant hammer blows, still raining upon this pseudo world, humanity finally becomes the humanity it was meant to be in the most detestable sense of the word, the real human, that is the rebel, the prisoner, the doubting, and the unconverted. World history, stripped bare from all pretenses, is not simply a record of events: it is nothing else than that through all these happenings, through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything becomes what it always has been. That’s why the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the reign of him who calls himself the Son of man, can only come when the Kingdom of the Beast has the entire world in his grasping hands.”

That is my introduction.

Here comes my speculation.

The church, as Bavinck points out, no longer can generate enough credibility to speak to the world in convincing terms. I already mentioned the Roman Catholic Church, with her priest problem. Look at the Pentecostals and the Southern Baptists with their heaven and rapture fakery. Look at the church that is following Trump. Today the entire word “Christian” has become a no/no word.

So my approach is totally different.

In my opinion two witnesses HAVE arisen. They unabashedly speak their mind and we better listen to them. Both can be found on YouTube.

Dr. Guy McPherson was a professor of Ecology and Nature Studies at the University of Arizona, for 20 years, when he resigned voluntarily before being pushed out by his department because of his views.

So what are his views? Based on his observations – which can be found in the ARCTIC NEWS website – he shows, conclusively in my opinion, that abrupt Climate Change is about to happen leading to extinction of all that lives, including us humans, hence the new acronym : NTE or Near Term Extinction.

He basically says that, “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. By upsetting the energy balance of the planet we are changing the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole. This in turn sets in motion major re-organizations of the flow patterns of the atmosphere and ocean.” This is confirmed by Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London. “The consequences are emerging and they are disruptive, and likely to become even more profoundly so”.

When you view his many videos on YouTube, you will see that Dr. McPherson is afraid that next season, 2019-20, will be decisive as by then the entire Arctic will be ice-free, which, according to him, confirmed by Sauli Niinistö, the Finnish Prime Minister, will mean the End of the World.
Here’s why.
Once the Arctic heats up, the Giga-tons of METHANE, a gas 100 times more lethal that CO2 Carbon Dioxide, will be released in the atmosphere, and cause a temperature rise of TEN DEGREES CELSIUS, high enough to burn us all. It reminds me of 2 Peter 3: 12, “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.”

McPherson often says that a doctor, asked by a patient how long he or she will live, never gives an exact time-frame. McPherson does the same. It reminds me of Jesus’ words in Matthew 24: 36, “”But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”. This to me suggests that we can perhaps pinpoint the year but that’s it.

I see this man as one of the witnesses, telling us to be ready, and emotionally and spiritually prepare ourselves to meet our Maker.

Then there is Dr. Jordan Peterson, witness Number Two.

He now is quite famous. He wrote “THE 12 RULES FOR LIFE, an antidote to Chaos”, which sold more than 2 million copies.

In this book he ashamedly professes that life is suffering, that human nature is sinful, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Repeatedly he quotes the Bible and sees it as foundational for life. God ‘spoke’ and he sees the LOGOS as the ultimate wisdom, referring to Christ as the perfect human, and resurrection as a given.
To quote Bavinck again, “And when they proclaim this, the Word will sound as something new, as something fresh, as something that deals with all the problems of the then living generation. Nothing stale, nothing withered, nothing that sounds like platitudes or lack fire in their delivery, no, every word will sparkle with spirit and expressed with extraordinary eloquence.”
Dr. Peterson is like that, witness his many presentations on YouTube, especially when interviewed by Paul VanderKlay, a Christian Reformed minister.

I see both these men as the Two Witnesses as described in Revelation 11, the 21st Century version.
Fact is that the church no longer can play its original role, constrained as it is by historical development. It usefulness is gone even though it will remain till the end, functioning in its historical capacity as the public face of religion. Bonhoeffer’s statement that “the church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things, it lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end,” is almost always ignored.

All this is fully in line with Jesus’ statement that THE END will come like a thief in the night. (Revelation 3: 3).

My topic this week is indeed very controversial. Many will disagree. Jesus, in Matthew 24:33, said: “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door.”
In today’s parlor, this means, “As soon as you read about the Sixth Extinction, and the ice disappearing in the Arctic, and people like Guy McPherson warning about the positive feedback of Methane, and Jordan Peterson making the Bible relevant again to young and old, you better take the words of Matthew 24 to heart: time is rushing to the END.

August 18 2018

HATE AND HERESY

“Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
Euripides, Greek poet 480 BC –406 BC

“Heresy is a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea.”
Dante, Italy, 1265-1321

I found these quotes in Donna Leon’s book THE WATERS OF ETERNAL YOUTH.

The “Lover’s Hate” maxim reminded me of my book, DAY WITHOUT END, in which our guardian angel, Cornelius, shows us the pre-historic world.

Here is that section:

We see the planet earth from a satellite vantage point, a large ball in an ocean of blue with a wisp of cloud here and there where green colours glimmer through, pure stark colours. As we edge in, we notice more detail: rainy jungles and sand-coloured desert. We continue our sweep, moving ever closer. The screen shows everything in three dimensions which gives the sensation that the earth is right there for the touching. I can sense the rich air, suggesting a high oxygen content. I ask Cornelius about this and he says, “Yes, the make-up of the air is different from what you were used to. Look at the large animals there–and we zoom in on a tree eating creature, resembling somewhat a gigantic ostrich– they could not live in less pure air.” He now zeroes in on an even more fierce-looking quadruped, equally ugly and ungainly in my opinion. A couple of these uglies are engaged in a fierce fight and we can hear their shrieks and loud bangs as their arms and legs pound on each other.
“Did God create these terrible looking beasts?” wonders Fidelia, “they are awful.”
“No,” replies Cornelius. “He had delegated this to Lucifer, his chief angel who wanted to experiment by creating animals of large size and huge proportion. However they proved quite destructive. I think they ate their own weight in foliage each week. Look, there is a pair at work. See how they rip through the trees, uproot them and leave gaping holes in the earth. Also they were fast breeders and their presence created a severe imbalance.”
“What happened? Did God allow Lucifer to get away with this?” inquires Phronimos.
“Well, you know God Creator,” continues Cornelius. “He called Lucifer to account and when he pleaded with God, He gave him another chance. Lucifer had argued that the climate on earth was too favourable for these creatures and wondered whether a greater variety in temperatures would keep them in check. God agreed, and he changed the atmospheric conditions. Look, here comes the next phase.”
We see enormous volcanic eruptions, spouting ashes, darkening the skies and polluting the atmosphere. Everywhere we see nothing but thick smoke and dark, bulging flames. I close my nose and cover my mouth against the penetrating smell of sulfur. It is a good thing that Cornelius now is at a safe distance from the rapidly changing atmosphere because the picture is so real that I can feel the earth shake violently and see enormous clouds of mists hiss and steam.
We now speed through time, passing through millions of years in a few seconds, and we see that the earth has taken on a different appearance: same round ball, but a more defined land mass, with a distinct white on both ends. The continents have drifted apart, forced by the enormous pressures of the subterranean forces, and I recognize them: there is Asia, topped by the gigantic Siberian vastness; the immense Pacific Ocean, a solid blue, with little dots here and there. As the earth circles, I point out the American land mass, stretching from pole to pole, and then a few moments later, Europe and Africa, almost all entirely emerald green, and in an expanse of almost perpetual purple, the Indonesian archipelago and Australia. When we move closer we see lots of experimental animals, both plant-eating and also large meat-eating monsters, all very impressive and gigantic, some of them having mouths like enormous horses. Phronimos suggests that no humans could dwell in such an environment and Cornelius nods in affirmation.
“Nothing really changed!” I exclaim, as I see the long necks and the large claw-like feet of these monsters, which also function as hands when they sit on their tail and so are able to reach even the highest tree tops. I also notice other animals with gigantic heads who tear other creatures apart as if they are made of paper.
“True,” says Cornelius. “So God called Lucifer again to his throne. When He pointed out to Lucifer that these animals and others just as ferocious in the seas meant that more benign developments would be impossible, they got into quite an argument. I was there and I have never seen anything like it since. Heaven usually is a quiet, peaceful place, but this was something else. I think Lucifer had plans from the start to challenge God and shape the cosmos according to his ideas.”
“What sort of character is Lucifer?” Phronimos wonders.
“He is a real charmer and by his smooth talk he convinced many more angels to join forces with him.”
“So, what happened?” asks Initia. We all are quite intrigued by this and eagerly await Cornelius’ answer.
“Well, first the Lord Creator banned Lucifer and his vassals from heaven and gave the Light-bearer the darkest place in creation, the deepest black hole in the universe, as his base of operation. Then God destroyed the earth completely. Watch.”
We now have moved quite a distance from the earth. We see the globe in the far, far distance, and for a good reason: a large asteroid is speeding to the earth. When it hits, black soot fills the sky and blocks out the sun. The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of rock and debris and volcanic lava. The rich, lush vegetation is buried deep in the earth. All living matter disappears and the earth goes into a deep, long sleep out of which it awakens in the form we know it. A large section of the globe is shrouded in white: the ice age has come and with it some human habitation and upon closer examination also different animals such as giant elephant-like creatures. The icy-period now fades quickly and with more moderate temperatures now prevailing, life, as we have experienced it, develops.
“And the rest you know,” says Cornelius.

Here is an episode where love turns sour, and degenerated into hate. Lucifer, also known as the Devil, the Satan, and The Evil One, switched from a love relationship – only LOVE can exist in God’s presence, as God IS Love – to total hatred, and consequently is banned from Heaven.

The Satan landed feet first on Earth, causing incurable wounds to God’s creation, grieving the Creator deeply, even more because it took the life of God’s only Son to remedy the situation.

Today we still are in that suffering stage, and the wounds are all too clearly visible, although we, in rural Tweed, notice little of it, as the heat has been moderate and the rains came in time. True, there is no real awareness of God and religion in our area, but that is par for the course. Relationships are another matter: divorce and poverty are rampant.

In my appraisal career I often had to evaluate the real estate assets of a couple splitting up: a tricky job, because one party wanted a low value while the other a high estimate. The bitterness and the anger, the animosity and hostility proved to me that when love turns to hatred, every action, even well-intended, is seen as an act of revenge.

That’s also the reason why angry spouses, mostly men, far too often kill their female partners, and often take their own lives also, indicating that, “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

HERESIES in theology

I like Dante’s definition of HERESY, “Being a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea.”

Today heresies abound, especially theological. Need I mention HEAVEN again, a truly pagan concept? Or Rapture?

We live in different times where the old is losing its validity. Take the church. If nothing else, look who go there: old folks like me. That alone tells m that the model no longer works.

The Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world, is a good example with its supposedly celibate clergy. An utterly outdated and totally unbiblical teaching, where, in fact the church is robbing the clergy of their humanity, a sin all too obvious today. With no women clergy there, the church pursues an utterly outdated and totally unbiblical practice.

In general the church clings to the Bible as God’s SOLE revelation, forgetting that there also is God’s permanent, direct Word, his creation.

By ignoring God’s creation, the church forfeits any chance to speak to the world. Today pastors need not only be theo-logians, knowing the Logos, the Word about Theos- God, through a thorough grasp of the Scriptures, but also be Ecologists connecting the Eco – the OIKOS, – the Earth to its maker.

HERESIES in economics

Heresies are equally evident in economics. Capitalism is based on the assumption that the earth’ resources are infinite. Their leaders believe that they can keep us supplied with what we want in perpetuity by exploiting the earth.

The result is all too obvious. We are suffering from a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea, which is leading to total societal collapse.

The global economy is so intimately integrated that the absence of one vital ingredient, such as rare earth minerals of which China is the major source, can stall production of the now so needed tools for Information Technology.

Still the major obstacle facing the world is the dependence on fossil fuels, an idea that will seal the doom of society.

Heresies in Politics.

Political heresies abound, especially today. In the USA, with the Congress members up for re-election every two years, raising money is their main concern, which often means securing funds from corporate donors, who dictate their wishes, usually not a voter’s priority. Also the lack of proportional representation in North America’s politics means that always a minority rules.

How then shall we live?

Time and again it boils down to the religious question, “How then shall we live in a world that is finite, a world that is indeed holy, because it is God’s very creation?”

Today, as no other time, this means sacrifices, for instance letting go of television, while reflecting and praying without ceasing. My constant prayer is “MARANATHA, Lord come quickly”. Writing, which I do every day, is a matter of reflection, a mind-opening exercise, which can lead to greater self-knowledge.

Growing food, digging into the soil, is my passion: I feel a kinship with the soil. When this spring a BLACK groundhog ate all my carefully cultivated cabbages, kale and green beans, fencing in my garden was no remedy. Fortunately my prayer for a predator to kill this nuisance was heard, and, thanks to warm days, warm nights, and lots of irrigation, I was able to restart these plants again.

Somehow, it seems, animals are more aggressive this year: chipmunks are eating my ripe tomatoes, crows and squirrels were after my apples, so I had the pick them before they were ripe – I have an early apple tree – and made apple sauce from them.

“How then shall we live?”

Ban HATE and HERESY and embrace LOVE for the earth and for all that lives and treasure the TRUTH of the Scriptures instead. John 3:16 embodies them both: “Love the cosmos, and the TRUTH of eternal life will be ours.”

I see the church’s task to prepare its members for the cosmos to come. For this the most appropriate text is Revelation 21: 1, “Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.”

There’s where our citizenship belongs. 1 John 5: 19 beyond dispute, claims that, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

We don’t belong to the first heaven and earth, a planet totally dominated by evil.

Reborn in Christ, we belong to the New Creation.

AUGUST 11 2018

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR CLIMATE CHANGE:
CAPITALISM
or
HUMAN NATURE
or???

The New York Times, its magazine insert on the August 5 Sunday Edition, had a 31,000 word essay – more like a small book – dealing with CLIMATE CHANGE, the first time a major paper gave such prominence to this global disaster.

Here is its opening statement.
“This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change.

“It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

“The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”

The article ends with these words:
“The author still believes that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it. Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.”

Doesn’t look very hopeful, does it? It seems that my apocalyptic views have been too optimistic.

Naomi Klein, famous Canadian writer, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of such international bestsellers as “This Changes Everything”, disagrees with the New York Times’ conclusion that human nature was at fault. Her thesis is that “Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.

Her 3100 word rebuttal ends as follows,
“We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.”

She thinks Socialism will save us!!

Who or what is really to blame?

Today we are seeing an enormous shift in the public perception of climate change: the end of the world has suddenly become popular.

More and more believe that Climate Change will continue unabated as the battle is against the combined forces of government (The USA comes to mind), industrial lobbies, and public apathy. We are like people hooked on drugs, on alcohol and on tobacco all at once: we all are CARBOHOLICS. To wean ourselves off this carbon addiction has become impossible, because everything, every action, every job we have, every bite of food we eat, every convenience we enjoy, every vacation we take, means another bit of carbon in the air, means another nail in the coffin of what we call mother earth.

So what do we do? Cut down? Change?

No we can’t, so we ignore all climate disasters, ignore all giant fires, ignore all huge heatwaves, ignore all drastic droughts. None of these weather events are having an impact on the public’s views on climate.

Take Boreal forests. They store enormous amounts of carbon that today’s mega-fires release, speeding up the heating process. Take Peatlands near the Arctic. They also contain megatons of carbon and mercury that is freed by today’s tundra fires.

Then there’s Siberia with the world’s largest boreal forests, already suffering more tree loss from fire than any other region. This, the planet’s biggest carbon stores threatens to become huge carbon sources instead, supercharging global warming. The deliberate illegal burning of enormous tracts of Amazon rainforest—more than 100,000 fires were detected by satellites in Brazil in September 2017—is another example of global threat, just as the Indonesian peat fires, also illegal and also done for agricultural land clearing. Now we can add boreal forest mega-fires and increasingly flammable tundra to the list of not-quite-natural disasters darkening our planetary future.

This fall we will see the Arctic Ocean free of ice. Who cares: nobody lives there. Still the Arctic Ocean hasn’t been free from ice for millions of years! Yet, there, in the shallow Arctic Seas, there’s where the methane is. Now, today, this very moment, this gas, 100 x more lethal than mere CO2, is about to come into play, rocketing the temperature sky high.

What is the result?

ARCTIC NEWS – have a look – reports that millions of people will die almost instantly when going outside in temperature of 35 Degrees Celsius and humidity of One Hundred Percent. People everywhere in the Middle East and South East Asia face that prospect in the near future.

It is true that much of the damage that might have been avoided is now inevitable. And yet….. Both Naomi Klein and the New York Times author still believe that it might not be too late to preserve some semblance of the world as we know it.

Says the Times piece: “Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope.”

Naomi Klein has at least the common sense to refrain from stupid remedies: “We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us.”

HOPE IN WHAT?

Here’s some personal stuff.

As a kid every Sunday afternoon I had to go to church for the second 90 minute service and was exposed to the preaching of the Heidelberg Catechism.

That fundamental confession was written some 450 years ago by two fellows in their early twenties. They wrote Question & Answer 8:
Question. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?
Answer. Yes, unless we are born again
by the Spirit of God.

I believe that in 1568 it was still possible to live a ‘clean’ life. The CO2 count was stable at 280 ppm, perhaps even lower, because Europe was then in a grip of a little ice-age. The lower the CO2 count, the colder the temperature and the higher it is, the warmer it gets. Very basic science.

Also my grandparents, born in the 1860-70’s, still could and did live clean lives, environmentally speaking. They also lived pious ones. I know. Their example is always before me. Their piety has formed me through my parents, to the third generation, and I believe even into the fourth. Yes, something stuck with me, making me the Calvinist I am, weaned on and spoon-fed with the Heidelberg Catechism.

Yes, especially today I believe that we are so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil, even when we are born again by the Spirit of God.

I better explain this.

Climate Change is today’s defining issue because it is a global phenomenon, and will affect everybody and everything on earth.
I realize, I am prone to make sweeping statements, based on gut rather than scientific observation, but then I use different criteria, such as the Bible, totally unheard of in today’s reporting. Also my reactions are coloured, no doubt, by events that occurred in my life, such as the Great Depression – 1930-39 – World War II, and simply my long life in business, always dealing with people.

My real reasoning is that, since we all use carbon-based fuel all the time, we are, no matter how holy we live, tainted by climate-changing substances. Based on that, and that alone, makes me suggest that there is not one person in the Western world who fits the bill of ‘born again’, unless that person constantly asks for forgiveness as doing such a simple thing as turning on the hot water, causes a flicker of pollution. Jesus could not be around today, living in today’s white society, without sinning.

Oh my! Who then can be saved!

One of the main obstacles to living holistically is THE CHURCH.

The trouble is that the church has mainly gone to bed with the Bible at the expense of Creation. At the danger of repeating myself I once again emphasize John 3:16 – God so loved the COSMOS – because the church by and large has succumbed to a dualistic view of life, separating God from his creation – the exact opposite of holistic.

Imagine honoring Johann Sebastian Bach without any reference to his music.

Creation is, and always will be God’s ETERNAL, PRIMARY AND DIRECT WORD, personified in Jesus, while the Scriptures, important as they are, will always be God’s TEMPORARY, SECONDARY AND INDIRECT WORD.

By believing in the Bible only, God’s secondary, impermanent and indirect Word, and regarding this as adequate for being born again by the Spirit, is at best a doubtful proposition. A person can’t be half-pregnant, can’t be conditionally ‘born again’.

To me Romans 1: 20 sums it up: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

“Do you understand what you read?” asked Philip when he met up with the Ethiopian nobleman who had made a special trip to Jerusalem to search for the TRUTH (Acts 8: 34).

Here in Romans 1: 20 we are told that by observing ‘nature’, recognizing its beauty, appreciating its harmony, admiring its coherence, treasuring its interdependence, we must conclude that only divine action was able to create such marvels, leaving us without the slightest excuse.

Note: the text does not mention the presence of the Bible at all, the sole tool the church employs.

O, clever Satan! The church has swallowed the Heaven Heresy hook, line and sinker. Even worse: it sees the earth, God’s Earth, as evil.

So here is my take on things. It is not just Capitalism – that too – it is not just human nature – that too – it is especially convential Christianity that has been the most significant factor in causing this global disaster to happen.

Jesus was killed by the church of his day, urged on by THE EVIL ONE. Today history is repeating itself: we are urged on BY THE EVIL ONE whose total aim is to destroy God’s Creation.

The church, by and large, has preached HEAVEN, has proclaimed escape from the earth, has abandoned God’s planet, at the instigation of THE EVIL ONE, who preferred – as Milton put it in PARADISE LOST – “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Satan purposely is creating HELL on Earth. Yes the Devil and his cohorts have only one goal: destroy God’s earth, and it has come in the form of Hell and High Water.

“Christians” ought to know better, Christ died to restore the earth. That’s about to happen. That’s why we have to live the beginning of that resurrection life NOW, Today, August 11 and beyond.

And if your church does not preach that sort of life: call the minister to account.

AUGUST 4 2018

“DO YOU THINK SOME OF THE THINGS WE DO CAN NEVER BE FORGIVEN?”

I found that question in Donna Leon’s novel “Earthly Remains”. One of the main characters, whose wife had died of cancer, and whose bees suffer from collapse blame these deaths on the criminal disposal of toxic chemicals in the waters where he lives near Venice, where Leon’s novels always take place.

The question reminds me of the sins against the Holy Spirit, which are indeed unpardonable. I believe that these sins change with the times. It seems to me that today sins against creation, the place where God has put us and mandated us to ‘serve’ it, fall into that category. The recent developments in our weather make this situation more relevant.

Fact is that the world is on fire, and we caused it: HELL on earth!

Why did I choose this topic? Last week I talked to my sister in law in Groningen where they operate a large dairy farm, having at least 200 heads of cattle, using robots for milking.

This year there was a catch, a big catch: Climate Change, until now a remote, even to them a doubted phenomenon, but it abruptly expressed itself as a ferocious force, relentlessly hammering almost all of Europe, where normally moderation, also weather-wise, reigns.

Cows need to eat, need to eat a lot, especially grass and hay. In the soggy Low Lands, with half the country below sea level, ditches are always filled with water, everywhere, with windmills sucking the land dry from the excessive moisture, so they make hay when the sun shines – often a rare occurrence, that is, until this summer.

From my schooldays I remember a poem: “O land van mest en mist, van vuile, koude regen…” translated, “O land of dung and dankness, of frigid, filthy rain”, occurring so often that it was one of the reasons I emigrated.

Not this year: harrowing heat, merciless sunshine are drying out the ditches, kill the flies, making the water-pumping picturesque windmills nothing more than a curiosity.

Cows need food, hay, grain, water. No rain, no nothing. My wife’s sister told me that they were feeding their cattle the hay reserved for the winter. On my question, ‘What about the winter, what do you feed them then?’ she had no answer.

If this drought were local, if it were the exception, feed would be available elsewhere, but suddenly heat in the so-called moderate temperature zones, is everywhere: almost all of Europe is in the grip of a tropical trauma.

Suddenly there is the spectrum of the END.

Suppose this unnatural event becomes standard? Suppose there is a permanent change in the weather? Suppose that we, sophisticated Westerners, wise to the ways of the world, have bet on the wrong horse?

Last week, as we have done for 65 years, at breakfast time, I read aloud a Psalm. Psalm 14 was the next in row, entitled, THE FOOLS. The intro tells me that a fool is not an ignoramus, but a person who has his values all wrong, who behaves as if God would never take action.

Today we experience God’s answer to our SINS AGAINST CREATION, sins that have a built-in punishment. We now live in ‘end-times’, where the normal is the abnormal, where all meaning is lost, where THE LIE has blackened the WHITE HOUSE, where there no longer is a universal truth, no more common decency, where people have lost faith in institutions, so where do we turn?

Oh yes, the news media duly mention the forest fires, and never forget to display some dramatic pictures how a dog is rescued and how a couple miraculously escapes the inferno, but that we now live in a new world, a satanic world of our own making, is never mentioned.

We are stuck in a new paradigm, totally of human origin, an earth ruled by The Evil One, a world diametrically different from the situation mentioned in Genesis 1-2 when, upon completion of creation, the Lord looked back on what he had made and called it very, very good.

Today only 13 percent of the waters that cover 70 percent of our planet is unaffected by the hand of man. Soon that too is history, and, as the earth itself has not a pure spot left, nothing of what God called ‘good’ will remain.

How long will that last?

Climate Change is a system that becomes more dangerous over time as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, and even decades after we stop these substances. We are just starting to see the horrors that climate change has in store for us. From here on bad things will get worse, much, much worse. Indeed, the news about what more to expect, coming out of new research, only darkens our picture of what to expect.

Heat kills, it kills soil, it kills animals, it kills people. Expect the price of food to be severely affected, which means inflation. Better get some growing skills, and make sure that you have an independent water source.

Highest and Best Use

During the last decades of my self-employment I was a Property Appraiser, appraising primarily industrial, commercial and large estates, including the 500,000 thousand acres of the Bruce Peninsula for a First Nation land claim. Part of each appraisal – which sometimes amounted to more than 100 pages – was its HIGHEST AND BEST USE. I remember appraising a store- service station which I gave a negative value because the removal of the oil tanks and the polluted soil would cost more than the value of the improvements.

That is the situation we are approaching in some cases on farm land and the improvements because, if we can’t feed the livestock, then land, building and herds are useless.

So what does that mean?

The real bad news is that the food we daily need, will go up in price and that the immovable, the land and the buildings, will go down in value: the worst of all possible scenarios.

And it will come unnoticed by most.

Public apathy and its cousin Climate Complacency are the silent enemies. Almost every day I bike to the village store – 5.6 km away – where I am the exception, also in bringing my own bag. Very few either seem to care or are willfully ignorant of the future that awaits us. The proverbial frog comes to mind, which blithely boils to death when slowly heated in a pan. That’s what awaits us with the pace of higher temperatures rapidly accelerating.

Yes, the current heatwave is a “timely reminder” that we cannot take food production for granted. Warnings are out about the crippling impact of the dry, hot weather on farms across the world. And it often comes with a double whammy: either not enough water, or too much, which today is the case in China.

Next year will be worse.

Another El Niño is on the way, which promises even higher temperatures, because a warmer Arctic comes with stronger heat waves, forest fires and associated emissions, and the rapid warming of water in rivers that end in the Arctic Ocean, all of which will further warm up the Arctic Ocean.

Then there is METHANE.

Forest fires have already been burning strongly in Siberia over the past few months and methane there recently reached levels as high as 2817 parts per billion (ppb).

Some Arctic lakes are bubbling with methane, are starting to look like witches’ brew. As Global warming heats up, the frozen ground melts, turning the permafrost to mucky mud, releasing the methane gases that have been trapped there ‘forever’, hence the word ‘perma’-frost with some 950 billion tons of carbon about to emerge.

Once this methane enters the stratosphere, altering the air, as yet still having the right combination of atmospheric gases, that is the end, THE END, as methane traps heat so fast that temperatures will shoot up by 10 degrees Celsius within 10 years, according to Dr. Guy McPherson.

God, in his eternal plan for creation, installed that mechanism into creation, just in case humans would opt for unleashing a carbon-poisoning economy rather than choose the organic, natural way of life.

I started out with the question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?”, so what is the answer?

The Created and Everlasting Word, God’s direct or primary revelation, tells us that we are in trouble, deep trouble. The written Word, the Scriptures, God’s temporary, indirect or secondary Word tells us exactly the same thing. The Bible tells us of creation, fall and ultimate deliverance. That deliverance is preceded by pain and tribulation. Take Revelation, Chapter 18: the poetry there, the unvarnished reality of today’s world:
Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!
She has become a home for demons
And a haunt for every evil spirit,
A haunt for every unclean and
Detestable bird.

For all the nations have drunk
The maddening wine of her
Adulteries…. And the merchants
Of the earth grew rich from her
Excessive luxuries.

Woe! Woe, O great city,
Glittering with gold, precious
Stones and pearls!
In One Hour such great wealth
Has been brought to ruin!

Rejoice over her, O heaven!
Rejoice, saints and apostles and
Prophets!

God has judged her – the great City –
For the way she treated you.

We all know or sense that the existing system cannot last. The signs are everywhere. The Bible also is a book of prophecy. The Old Testament repeatedly warned the Hebrew Nation, God’s Chosen People, to mend their ways, or perish. Now it is our turn.

Now the chosen people are within the 7.6 billion of us, globe-trotters and earth inhabitants.

Curiously these saints will rejoice when The Great City, the current economic system, will collapse. WHY? Because its entire existence, our wealth and prosperity, is totally intertwined with the energy sector. Nothing today works without causing pollution, and consequently without causing more climatic havoc and planetary pain. Each day new stories emerge of people and animals suffering from perils brought about by our way of life.

We have become immune to the suffering of creation. But if we believe the Bible and especially the Book of Revelation, we know that it fully condemns our capitalistic system of which we all are part, and which will come apart. As Revelation 18 points out (verse 11), “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her (the city) because no one will buy their cargoes any more – the cars and luxury houses, the yachts and penthouses.” That means economic depression and enormous deflation.

We really should be in agony because everywhere creation is suffering and with it are those who care for creation, as God wants us to. Romans 8: 22, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

Coming back to the original question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?” calls for a thorough self- examination, preceded and accompanied by a lot of prayer and soul-searching.

Nietzsche was right. In his Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra), he writes, “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Nietzsche’s call us to “be true to the earth”, and not listen to those preachers who tells us that we are heaven-bound.

We all sin against the earth, repeatedly, all the time. We must see the earth as holy, as is plain from the Lord’s Prayer. There the very first line is, “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, a phrase which we recite without thinking. Psalm 33: 9 says that “He spoke and it came to be,” meaning that God’s name is on everything, and thus ‘hallowed” or ‘HOLY’. When we sin on purpose against the earth, then God will have no mercy.

Example? Having a ATV or Skidoo for ‘recreational’ or better ‘cosmos desecrating’ rides only, causing noise and air pollution, combined with the Rapture belief, seems to me an unpardonable sin against creation.

I started out with the question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?”

The short answer is “Yes”.